Word: silicon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...major technology in development at the Center are DNA chips--matrices that contain a large set of genes from a particular organism all mounted on a silicon wafer...
Until recently, Dreier and his fellow Republicans had managed to separate the two issues. Cash-rich, labor-hungry Silicon Valley companies have been pushing Congress to make it easier to import programmers and engineers rapidly. To satisfy the Valley, Congress wants to raise the cap on so-called H-1B visas for the second time in two years...
From the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible inelegance of scale. It's scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to attempt such a thing...
Jeff Bridges got zapped into it in TRON. Keanu Reeves reached it by means of a red pill in The Matrix. In Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash--a cult classic in Silicon Valley--our hero, Hiro Protagonist, goes there wearing goggles and a pair of virtual-reality gloves. It's where I expect to be spending my evenings in the twilight of my life, without ever leaving the comfort of my sofa. And--who knows?--maybe I'll meet you there...
Impossible? No, inevitable. Three important trends are on a collision course: the growing power and wealth of the game industry (the 21st century's answer to Hollywood), exponential advances in silicon and biotechnology, and a demographic shift that will put purchasing power in the hands of a generation that was brought up on video games and sees no point in putting them away. Already, the majority of people who play on PCs and video consoles are over 18. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent by the likes of Microsoft and Sony to ensure that they'll still...